


Let's Fly Away

by parcequelle



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Episode Related, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 02:14:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parcequelle/pseuds/parcequelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Post 1x12, wherein T'Pol tells Hoshi she'll teach her how to meditate.) This is not what she expected, but it's better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Fly Away

This is nothing like what she expected when she agreed to come here, nothing like what she thought T'Pol could do – it's so much better, so much more, exactly what she quietly secretly hoped for and wanted and _needs_.

Hoshi breathes. The touch of T'Pol’s fingers on her body, in her mind, mental and physical indeterminate and extinguished. Sensation escalates, piercing the boundaries of her awareness; it is a foreign kind of invasion, what she’s always imagined telepathy to be, but it is not unwelcome. The entry to her consciousness works both ways, a two-way channel, so that her thoughts are no longer contained within her mind.

Her mind and her body are one, and Hoshi finds herself wondering, dimly, why she’d ever believed there to be a separation. It’s indistinct, of course it is; she is swimming through energy, is energy, light and sound and vibration all interconnected through time hung suspended, rendered useless. The thought of keeping time is implausible, alien – Hoshi is time, she is here, the collision of past and future culminating in the erasure of the present, she is everything and nothing, black and white, space and matter. Hollow and full, overflowing. She is emptiness locked in captivity, stricken, enlightened, delighted, on fire.

T'Pol’s hands bestow kisses, she knows. Hoshi knows. Hoshi speaks to her in Vulcan in her mind, through her body, her lips stretching consonants, cradling vowels like a native. Her tongue marks the break in each sound and she knows that most people forget that, she knows; most people don’t know that the placement of teeth or of tongue is the difference between comprehension and garble. So tiny a slip, but Hoshi knows, too, that there’s danger in underestimating small things (and small people). Like language. People link language is huge, overbearing, but Hoshi knows language is really just a set of equations and rules and exceptions, infinitesimal detail strung together in a universal search to bring order to chaos.

People call her a prodigy, a genius, but Hoshi knows better. Hoshi knows that language is easier than humanity and bravery and fear, she knows that it’s simple once you understand the rules. Hoshi likes language because it will never be enough, it will never be over; she will always be able to break down the structures further, make them smaller. Hoshi is good at making things smaller, at dividing things into neatly accessible packages to be read by other people. She likes that, she likes being able to do that. She likes that power. She likes that people don’t realise she has it; at least not usually, at least not all people, but T'Pol knows. T'Pol sees her now, in this, through this; feels her, reads her in a way that is so startlingly intimate that it makes Hoshi gasp soft, soft and so loud in this quiet quiet room, on this quiet plane that is them and nothing else, makes her gasp and catch her breath.

They float, together, intertwined, apart, here and there and up and down and backwards, out of the future and into the past and around a time that has no name, no description at all. T'Pol guides her, gently, securely, guides and gives and receives and lets her lead, and Hoshi does. And as she does, she knows herself, knows her power and her body and her mind, simultaneously foreign and familiar.

At the perfect time, no sooner and no later, T'Pol comes down, floats back down to the ground with a ghostly hand to draw Hoshi down along with her, beside her, and they land together like feathers, like breaths of air, like the sigh of a breeze. Time pulses in and around them as they return to their own plane, their own time, and then, slowly, finally, Hoshi opens her eyes.

T'Pol's are already open, are studying her. She looks, if anything, even calmer than usual, almost unmoved. Hoshi wants to laugh but doesn't, just smiles; finds that she, too, feels calmer than she had before, in the wake of anxiety about what this would be, about making herself vulnerable to T'Pol, to her power. To her harshness, Hoshi had thought. Another world.

T'Pol keeps watching her, and asks, 'How do you feel? Did it … agree with you?'

Hoshi does laugh, now, a breathy exhalation. 'Yes, it – it did agree with me. Very much.' She eyes her consideringly. 'It just … wasn't really what I was expecting. That's all.'

'I trust that I have not made you uncomfortable.' Not a question, not a glimpse of something other than her customary aloofness, but Hoshi knows her better, now. Because of this. She won't touch her hand; that is a human gesture of comfort, but she does nod, does smile.

'Not at all,' she murmurs. 'I wouldn't have come alone if I didn't...' she pauses. 'Trust you.'

T'Pol nods; the matter is closed. She stands, and Hoshi follows suit, precedes her to the door of her quarters. She turns to her as she's going to leave, opens her mouth to speak – but what can she say that she has not already said? She feels the need for communication strangely unnecessary, strangely unsuitable, now. T'Pol understands her, so Hoshi just says, 'Thanks.'

'It was… my pleasure,' T'Pol says, and Hoshi smiles. 'Would it appeal to you to attempt the same procedure again next week?'

'Absolutely,' she replies, without hesitation. 'It would.'

'Then I shall update my schedule accordingly.'

'Me too.'

They nod to each other politely and part ways, but Hoshi feels none of the frostiness, none of the hardness she had earlier attributed to her colleague, wonders how much of it was ever really there. Maybe it will turn out that she'd underestimated T'Pol; maybe it will turn out that she'd judged her too harshly. And maybe, just maybe, it will turn out that in this woman, in this hard and cold and unfriendly, unconnected Vulcan woman, she might be able to find a friend after all.

She heads back to her own quarters light, mind still pleasantly peaceful, and she breathes.


End file.
